"Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that's sinful, then let me be damned for it! Don't turn the light on."
-Blance DuBois in "A Streetcare Named Desire"
Every movie book or play is filled with lies and misrepresentation. Characters have facades, authors have hidden motives, fiction isn't true and words don't mean what they mean to. Authors sometimes acknowledge this with a wink at the camera (the province of The Simpsons), or sometimes in a speech like Vivien Leigh's above. Lies are what makes the world of literature turn, and as Blanche DuBois suggests, there is 'magic' in these lies. It is magic that allows the worlds of Tolkien, Shakespeare, Vonnegut and Eliot to exist. And like any true magician (Prospero), the mark of good magic is that they bring you into their world, and for a moment, you forget your own. With a real magician it happens in that moment when you might wonder if there really is magic in the world, and for an author, it happens when your imagination takes over and the stark reality of life disappears. It seems, if only for a moment, that the whole world has been consumed by the author's world. Certain books, movies or plays do this to all of us. Watching the Neverending Story still has that effect on me even with all of its flaws. Star Wars is such a wonderful movie because of its immersiveness not, as is often said, because of its fairly stock characters or philosophical musings. While dropped into an immersive world we're not caught off guard by new scenes, sets or characters, because each fits perfectly into this world. The job of the author is to make us accept the initial premise, and then develop a consistent world around it. People probably choose their favorite genres around what premises they are willing to accept. Some people are willing to accept aliens and spaceships, while others are happier with love at first sight. Often we are willing to accept the most ludicrous premise if it offers us a world or life we crave more than any other (See Star Trek V, or really any Star Trek other than late DS9).
So far my examples have been primarily fantastical in nature, but this magic trick happens all the time, and we often accept it without even realizing it. My favorite example is that people often mock musicals because they express emotions by breaking into song and dance, but take, on the other hand, average movie dialogue. Stock plotting in action movies or romantic comedies has characters falling "in love" within moments of meeting or after one date. They express these feelings in short bursts of "meaningful dialogue," but, as anyone who's ever actually had a conversation about life, love or the weather knows, conversations, last longer than 2 or 3 minutes. People don't make grand, vague statements concealing hidden depth and purpose without the recipient of the comment asking about it i. e. "did you just make a reference to your past that the audience knows about, but you've been concealing from me and now you're hinting that you want to tell me but feel too embarrassed to do so? Well I guess I won't ask you about the past that clearly is having an effect on our present relationship so that the movie can go for a full 90 minutes and maintain suspense." Characters in stock romances or action films don't talk to each other, but make statements for the audience to assure to them that the plot is moving. Again, this is not a problem, it's just a lie that we've become so comfortable with we don't even acknowledge it exists. I don't object, because the world where that happens is a nice place to visit from time to time.
Looking for magic in poems or movies is part of the fun. Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" is a movie, about magic, that announces itself to be lies at the beginning, and uses that to confuse the viewer into accepting them. When I watched it for a second time, I was still so caught up in the tricks that without really noticing, I was sucked into the it and impressed with the magic even though I already knew 'the prestige.' Lies are misrepresentations for the background for nearly all of Hitchcock's work, and when watching his movies its hard to look away. The lies an author presents don't necessarily take us to nice places, but they take us to worlds where we want to spend time. Whether its the adrenaline that flows from a good suspense or a pitter-patter of a heart while Fred Astaire sings "The Way You Look Tonight" to Ginger Rogers with a head full of shampoo (it's actually whipped cream. Lies!)
The authors of these moments agree able to create the most wonderfully immersive places through clever lies, and when everything works, its magical. All that is required to visit is accepting a few falsities, and in return they offer feelings of joy, sadness and, for a moment, escape from the world.
P.S. I think Belle sums up much about why we need these stories here. "I want much more than this provincial life" indeed. The lie in this story is that there is more out there. Most of us will have to be content to create that more in a less tangible way than Belle.
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